Steve Sabella’s practice begins with photography, but it does not end with photography as evidence. Across more than three decades, his work has pushed the image away from its conventional role as a record of reality and toward a more unstable, generative terrain: the image as a site where memory, place, history, and imagination are excavated, fractured, and rebuilt.

This distinction is essential. Sabella does not reject reality. He rejects the assumption that photography simply delivers it. His work asks what happens when an image stops behaving as a window and becomes a place in itself — a surface, fragment, wound, architecture, fiction, archive, and threshold. In this sense, his photography belongs less to the tradition of documentary confirmation than to a practice of visual archaeology.

Kamal Boullata understood this early. In his foreword to Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, Boullata writes that Sabella uses the camera almost as a painter uses a brush, and that the artist’s abstractions are best understood as “mental images.” More importantly, Boullata argues that in Sabella’s work time and memory take on a body through abstraction; form does not decorate thought, but is generated by it. Photography becomes not merely the trace of what was seen, but the structure through which loss, absence, and memory become visible.1

Hubertus von Amelunxen, whose long essay in the same monograph remains one of the most sustained readings of Sabella’s work, places the practice in an intermediate zone between image and language, place and displacement, presence and absence. The result is not photography as proof, but photography as translation — a movement through fragments, surfaces, ruptures, and returns.2

The central proposition of Sabella’s practice may be stated simply: the image is not a passive record of the world. It is one of the places where the world is made, unmade, and made visible again.

Sabella was born in Jerusalem in 1975 and studied art photography at the Musrara School of Photography, graduating in 1997. His early works, including Search, Identity, and End of Days, are rooted in landscape, city, light, and the visual conditions of living in Palestine. Yet even these early images are not conventional documents. They already show a distrust of the photograph as a stable account of place. Infrared light, reversal, darkness, fragmentation, and disorientation become ways of asking whether reality can be seen directly at all.

This is the first movement in Sabella’s practice: the photograph begins as a relationship to place, but place itself is never secure. Jerusalem appears not as a fixed subject, but as a contested visual field. In von Amelunxen’s formulation, Sabella’s work is devoted to place and to “other-than-place.” The artist sets up a world with his camera and contradicts that set-up.3

In Till the End (2004), this contradiction becomes material. Sabella printed black-and-white photographic emulsion directly onto Jerusalem stone. The image no longer sits on paper. It enters a geological body, a fragment of place already carrying its own time. Photography, often understood as the fixing of a moment, is bound to stone, a material associated with duration, origin, and architectural memory. The work marks a decisive shift: the photograph is no longer simply about Jerusalem; it is physically carried by a fragment of Jerusalem.

Kan Yama Kan (2005) expands this concern into installation. Wooden boxes painted by Palestinian artists contain photographic stories viewed through peepholes and moved by a crank. The title, meaning “once upon a time,” invokes storytelling, but the mechanism complicates nostalgia. The viewer sees only fragments. Narrative becomes partial, mediated, and bodily. Already, Sabella is asking the viewer not to receive an image passively, but to enter a structure of looking.

Exit (2006) is a turning point because the landscape leaves the land and enters the body. The series consists of isolated hands photographed against black grounds: hands aged, marked, bruised, twisted, or tenderly exposed. They are not portraits in the conventional sense. They withhold identity while intensifying presence. The hand appears as a fragment of the body, but also as a map — a terrain of labor, touch, injury, survival, and time.

Several critics have recognized this shift. Christa Paula described Exit as a disturbing photographic sequence of aged hands that Sabella called “exilic landscapes,” while Sarah Irving noted how each hand seems to imply stories of work, touch, love, injury, beauty, and pain.4 Von Amelunxen reads the hands more radically: as places of history and memory, where the marks left by time behave like superimpositions and layers. The body becomes a palimpsest. Skin becomes archive.5

In this sense, Exit expands Sabella’s excavation of place into an excavation of embodiment. The photographed hand is not evidence of a person; it is a site where life has written itself. If Till the Endattached the photograph to stone, Exit attaches history to skin. Both works ask the same question from different directions: where does memory reside when place has been fractured?

Sabella moved to London in 2007 and later to Berlin in 2010. This biographical shift transformed the visual logic of his work, but not in the simple sense of “making work about exile.” The deeper change is structural. Exile becomes a method of seeing.

In Exile (2008) is the central rupture. Made from multiple photographs of London windows and façades, the series breaks architecture into fragments and reassembles it into dense, almost abstract compositions. Boullata describes this shift as a movement from a photographic way of seeing to a cubistic imagining.1 On the work’s project page, Martina Corgnati writes that Sabella transforms fragments into tesserae of an overwhelming mosaic of visual splinters, where the exile becomes a permanent condition untangled from physical place.6

Von Amelunxen calls In Exile “a cut through the place,” a description that is crucial. The work is not only a collage. It is an incision. The London façades become architectural skin: blind windows, opaque surfaces, and dislocated fragments shaken into order. Only from close range does the viewer discover that the image has been assembled from pieces of the real. From a distance, it appears like a field of pattern; from within, it becomes a structure of psychological dislocation.

Here Sabella’s work moves decisively beyond the index. The photograph still refers to something in the world, but its meaning arises from what happens after exposure: cutting, repetition, mirroring, layering, rhythmic displacement. These gestures do not hide reality; they reveal that reality is already fractured. The image does not describe exile. It performs exile formally.

Settlement — Six Israelis & One Palestinian (2008–10) takes the question of the image into the exhibition room itself. Commissioned for the inaugural exhibition of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, the installation consists of seven large photographs: six Israeli men on one wall, and Sabella himself, the one Palestinian, on the opposite wall.7 All are photographed standing in their underwear before a concrete wall.

The work is often described through its political ratio, but its deeper force lies in its staging of perception. The viewer cannot see both sides simultaneously. To stand inside the installation is to stand inside asymmetry. One must turn, choose, remember what is behind, and become aware that looking itself has a position. Dorothea Schoene writes that the installation makes the viewer a “discomfited witness,” while other critics have noted how it forces visitors to walk between opposing walls as if taking part in an actual event.8

Von Amelunxen reads the conflict as configured in spatial confrontation. The wall behind the figures is not merely a background; it becomes the preclusion of negotiation, a mute architecture of separation.9Yet the bodies complicate the confrontation. Stripped of uniforms and external markers, the men appear vulnerable, exposed, and nearly interchangeable. The installation does not resolve the political structure it stages. It makes its imbalance bodily and spatial.

Settlement is therefore not only an image of conflict. It is a visual apparatus that produces the ethical difficulty of looking. It transforms the gallery into an intermediate zone where the viewer encounters the political not as information, but as orientation, distance, ratio, and pressure.

Metamorphosis (2012) carries the fragmentation of In Exile into a sharper confrontation with walls, cactus, barbed wire, bricks, security grilles, and architectural obstruction. The work remains photographic, but it no longer behaves like a view. A single motif is repeated, mirrored, multiplied, and reconfigured until the subject begins to lose its first meaning and enter another order.

Von Amelunxen places Metamorphosis in continuity with In Exile, yet also sees it as a leap. The cycle splinters objective space; the central perspective of photography is shattered; motifs are mounted in difference to themselves, as if spoken to an echo.9 The image no longer offers ground, horizon, or stable orientation. It becomes a field of repetition, fracture, and counterpoint.

This is especially important in works that use the Separation Wall or barbed wire. Nat Muller writes that in a work from Metamorphosis, the wall is multiplied into a dizzying motif, with no top or bottom, no sky or ground. Sabella himself has described the project as a conflict between form and function, visualization and perception: if part of the wall can be transformed into pure form, then the image begins to defeat what the wall represents.10

The critical point is not that the wall disappears. It does not. Rather, its function is interrupted by form. Barbed wire, normally an instrument of restriction, becomes line, stitch, wound, drawing, rhythm. Architecture becomes unstable. Obstruction becomes pattern. The liberated image here is not an image that denies violence; it is an image that refuses to let violence dictate the only possible visual grammar.

Independence (2013) marks another shift. After years of fragmentation, cutting, layering, and structural abstraction, Sabella turns toward floating human bodies suspended in dark water or abyss-like space. The bodies are blurred, refracted, and ambiguous; they seem peaceful yet unsettled, falling yet flying, connected yet separate.

In relation to the broader image-world of the early 2010s — social media, citizen journalism, low-resolution images, and the circulation of conflict footage — Malu Halasa frames Independence as a response to the transformed conditions of how images are created, distributed, and experienced. Sabella’s own statement is precise: he did not need a Hasselblad or even a traditional camera; the smartphone became enough because “nothing” would stop the image from being made. For him, this was also independence from the medium.11

The series therefore does not abandon photography’s earlier questions. It intensifies them. Seth Thompson notes the painterly distortion of the bodies, whose representations in water appear almost like gestural brushstrokes.12 Von Amelunxen describes the work as a pictorial state of uncertainty that abandons the coordinates of space and history.13 Unlike Settlement, where bodies confront each other across a political room, Independence releases the body into suspension. There is no stable ground, no wall, no fixed horizon. What remains is the body as threshold.

This release matters. Independence is not simply a title; it names a condition of visual and psychological transition. The image is no longer bound to the architecture of exile or the literal wall. It enters water, darkness, and motion. It asks whether freedom may first appear not as clarity, but as suspension — the moment before a body knows whether it is falling or flying.

If In Exile turns architecture into a mental image, 38 Days of Re-Collection (2014) turns the photograph into an archaeological object. The work was made from black-and-white photographic images printed with emulsion onto colored fragments of paint and plaster collected from walls in Jerusalem’s Old City, including the house in which Sabella was born. The photographs were taken in a Palestinian house in Ein Karim occupied after 1948.14

The color in these works is not photographic color. It comes from the wall. It comes from layers of paint accumulated over years of domestic life. The black-and-white image is projected onto a fragment whose own history supplies the chromatic field. What appears at first to be a fragile photographic object is also architecture, residue, and displaced home.

In his memoir The Parachute Paradox, Sabella describes peeling into hidden layers of paint and feeling “like an archaeologist,” collecting what others were throwing away. This autobiographical passage is not incidental; it clarifies the deeper logic of the work. The artist is not using archaeology as metaphor alone. He is physically excavating walls, surfaces, and traces of habitation.15

Ella Shohat’s reading of 38 Days of Re-Collection gives the work one of its strongest critical frames. She describes the scraping of walls as an excavation of buried lives, and as a means to visualize intermingled histories again.16 T. J. Demos reads the fragments as archaeological traces that materialize geopolitical dislocation, while von Amelunxen characterizes the works as ghostly — suspended between presence and absence.17

This is where Sabella’s practice most forcefully departs from ordinary categories of photography. The work is not documentary, but it is not detached from history. It is not sculpture, but it behaves as an object. It is not painting, yet color emerges from the material ground. It is not an archive in the institutional sense, yet it preserves what official archives often cannot: the intimate residue of lives displaced by history.

The word “liberation” in Sabella’s practice should not be read as a slogan. It is a visual method. In his writing, especially in “The Colonization of the Imagination” and later in The Parachute Paradox: Decolonizing the Imagination, Sabella argues that images shape consciousness. Occupation operates not only through territory, but through the images people carry of themselves, their future, and the limits of what can be imagined.18

The liberated image is therefore not an image free from history. It is an image freed from captivity to a single function: evidence, reportage, victimhood, propaganda, ornament, or market category. A liberated image opens another relation to reality. It does not deny the wound; it refuses to let the wound become the only horizon.

Sinopia (2014), commissioned for the Bahrain National Museum, helps clarify this movement. The works are based on urban views of Bahrain, but the city becomes almost unrecognizable, transformed into layers, stripes, rhythms, and painterly abstractions. Von Amelunxen reads the cycle through counterpoint, atopia, and utopia — decisive placelessness and the possibility of place. Here Sabella’s art moves beyond exile as a theme, while retaining displacement as a generative condition.

This matters because it prevents a common misreading of the work. Sabella is not only an artist of Palestinian exile. He is an artist of image-formation. Palestine, Jerusalem, exile, and occupation are not labels attached to the work; they are historical forces that sharpen its investigation into how images are built, circulated, broken, and reimagined.

After 2014, Sabella’s practice continues to expand the idea of the photograph as an excavated site. No Man’s Land (2015), a monumental triptych exhibited at the Palestinian Museum in Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape, turns landscape into a field of uncertain belonging. Tina Sherwell writes that in the work the specificity of place is lost, while fragments of landscape create a cosmos. The title also carries a specifically Palestinian charge, recalling the strip of land that divided East and West Jerusalem after 1948.19

All That Remains (2018) brings fragments from different histories into proximity: a fragment collected from Auschwitz-Birkenau placed in relation to fragments carrying photographs taken in a Palestinian house occupied in 1948. The work does not collapse histories into sameness. It places them near one another so that the viewer must confront the moral difficulty of historical repetition, injury, and memory. Daniela Brignone writes that the installation establishes a relationship of proximity while preserving the autonomy of its materials, placing the observer before immense and concrete questions.20

The Great March of Return (2019) takes another path. The work gathers over 1,000 photographs taken by five Palestinian photojournalists in Gaza and places them in relation to imagery of outer space. The sealed geography of Gaza is opened toward the cosmic. Reportage becomes monumental composition. The crowd becomes more than news: it becomes a visual field of return, grief, and collective imagination. Daniela Brignone reads the work in relation to Renaissance art and a “space without borders,” while Al-Araby Al-Jadeed compared the mural-like composition to a Palestinian Sistine Chapel.21

Everland (2020), composed from Palestinian embroidery, shifts the terrain again. It is not built from landscape or urban fragments, but from the visual language of textile, pattern, and cultural memory. The work treats embroidery not as decorative heritage but as an image-system: a structure of belonging, repetition, and living code. Its nine square compositions reassemble patterns from traditional Palestinian costumes, where motifs carry ancestry, place of origin, and the transmission of memory across generations.22

Elsewhere (2020) and New Image Order (2024) bring the archive more directly to the surface. Elsewhere reworks nineteenth-century photochromes of historic Palestine, with images also drawn from Syria and Lebanon, into a journey through a land that exists as image, memory, and imagination. New Image Order recombines nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photochromes into speculative historical scenes where colonial visual records are unsettled and re-staged.23

Together, these later works show that the liberated image is not a style but a method. Each material or source — crowd, embroidery, satellite view, historic photochrome, architectural fragment — becomes a way to release the image from inherited containment and return it as a field where history can be reassembled without being simplified.

These works are not nostalgic returns to the past. They are interventions into inherited images. They ask what happens when the archive is not treated as a container of truth but as a field of power. Who made the image? Who colored it? Who circulated it? What did it make visible, and what did it make impossible to imagine?

In Planet Earth (2025), Sabella turns to satellite views of the world. Geography loosens into abstraction; rivers become brushstrokes, land becomes atmosphere, and the planet appears at once beautiful, measured, and governed. From above, the world becomes image and instrument. Sabella reframes and recombines these terrains until geography gives way to abstraction, producing what his project page calls an aesthetic excavation: looking down to look within.24

This latest direction connects unexpectedly with his developing work on Berlin’s Mauerpark graffiti wall. There, too, Sabella is working with surfaces that are constantly overwritten, erased, and renewed. The wall becomes an urban palimpsest: a living archive of gesture, disappearance, and public imagination. As in 38 Days of Re-Collection, the surface is not a background. It is the historical body of the image.

To understand Sabella’s practice only through the language of exile is to stop too soon. Exile is present, but it is not the final meaning. It is the pressure that transforms the image. Likewise, to describe the work only as collage is to mistake method for ontology. The deeper question is not how the image is assembled, but what kind of reality the assembled image makes possible.

Sabella’s practice belongs to a lineage of artists who have challenged photography’s claim to transparency. Yet his contribution is particular. He brings together the philosophical question of the image, the political history of Palestine, the materiality of surfaces, and the psychological work of imagination. The photograph becomes a site of excavation: not because it uncovers a single buried truth, but because it reveals that every image carries layers — of time, power, memory, absence, and desire.

The liberated image, in Sabella’s work, is not an escape from the world. It is a return to the world through another visual order. It is an image that refuses captivity to the already seen. It opens a space where what erasure tried to remove can reappear, not as illustration, but as form.

That is why Sabella’s photography cannot be reduced to witness, archive, collage, or exile, although it passes through all of them. It is a practice of re-entering the image after history has damaged it. It asks the photograph to do more than remember. It asks it to become a site where memory can think, where place can return without becoming fixed, and where the imagination can recover the territories it was taught to surrender.

In this sense, the liberated image is not simply an image of freedom. It is freedom working inside the image.

1. Kamal Boullata, “Foreword,” in Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, Hatje Cantz / Akademie der Künste, 2014, pp. 6–8.
2. Hubertus von Amelunxen, “Prolegomenon,” in Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, Hatje Cantz / Akademie der Künste, 2014.
3. Hubertus von Amelunxen, “After the Last Sky,” in Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, pp. 33–41.
4. SteveSabella.Space, Exit, including excerpts by Christa Paula and Sarah Irving.
5. Hubertus von Amelunxen on Exit, in Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, pp. 135–137.
6. SteveSabella.Space, In Exile, including excerpts by Martina Corgnati, Hubertus von Amelunxen, Kamal Boullata, and others.
7. SteveSabella.Space, Settlement — Six Israelis & One Palestinian; see also Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Told/Untold/Retold, 2010–11.
8. Dorothea Schoene and other press excerpts on Settlement, reproduced on SteveSabella.Space.
9. Hubertus von Amelunxen on Settlement, Metamorphosis, and Independence, in Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, pp. 198–201.
10. SteveSabella.Space, Metamorphosis, including excerpts by Hubertus von Amelunxen, Malu Halasa, Nat Muller, Beatrice Benedetti, Sheyma Buali, and Dorothea Schoene.
11. SteveSabella.Space, Independence, including excerpts by Malu Halasa.
12. Seth Thompson, Afterimage, excerpt on Independence reproduced on SteveSabella.Space.
13. Hubertus von Amelunxen on Independence, in Steve Sabella: Photography 1997–2014, pp. 198–201.
14. SteveSabella.Space, 38 Days of Re-Collection, technical description and excerpts from Hubertus von Amelunxen and others.
15. Steve Sabella, The Parachute Paradox: Decolonizing the Imagination, Kerber Verlag, 2016, p. 281.
16. Ella Shohat, “An Aesthetics of Dis/Placement: Steve Sabella’s 38 Days of Re-Collection,” in Fragments from Our Beautiful Future, Kerber Verlag, 2017.
17. T. J. Demos, “Archaeological Traces,” and Hubertus von Amelunxen, essays in Fragments from Our Beautiful Future, Kerber Verlag, 2017; see also SteveSabella.Space, 38 Days of Re-Collection.
18. Steve Sabella, “The Colonization of the Imagination,” Contemporary Practices, Vol. 10, 2012; Steve Sabella, The Parachute Paradox: Decolonizing the Imagination, Kerber Verlag, 2016.
19. SteveSabella.Space, No Man’s Land, including Tina Sherwell’s text from Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape, Palestinian Museum, 2019.
20. SteveSabella.Space, All That Remains, including Daniela Brignone’s essay for BLOCKS, Museo Riso / Albergo delle Povere, Palermo.
21. SteveSabella.Space, The Great March of Return, including artist statement and texts by Daniela Brignone and Mohammed al-Assad.
22. SteveSabella.Space, Everland.
23. SteveSabella.Space, Elsewhere; SteveSabella.Space, New Image Order.
24. SteveSabella.Space, Planet Earth.